On being asked about the casting process, Nikkhil said, “The moment you tell actors that for one and a half year they cannot do anything else, it narrows down to few actors. There are only a few who are willing to agree to that. I told Chirag that I do not want to see Gandhiji in any other show or film. Secondly, we had to see how close physically they were to the characters. Jagdish dada, who was our hair and makeup person would sit with us. I saw Rajendra in Vedaa as Sharvari’s dad and Siddhant has Nehru’s nose…”
The series is based on a book of the same name authored by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins. Asked how he brought an Indian perspective to the show, considering the book was not written by Indians, he said, “Freedom at Midnight was first published in 1975. It is an incredible book. I like it because it does not take itself too seriously. A lot of books have been written on India’s freedom which are probably better. But for a young teenage boy, it was an incredible read. It felt like a screenplay. I wondered why no one is making anything on this. There is no denying that Mountbatten loved Is Paris Burning? and O Jerusalem!, the previous two books written by Collins and Lapierre. So, he called them and asked them to write about how he was involved in the freedom movement. Mountbatten was too full of himself. While the book has all his accounts, they don’t know what happens after 15th August. They had no access to that information. So, the show is from the perspective of India. India, as a country, is telling what happened with her.”
Nikkhil also feels that the relevance of telling a story at this time and age is that people have corrupted the word patriotism. “I am so disturbed that the word and the concept of patriotism has been completely corrupted by us, by modern society. The show is about patriotism because it does not tell anyone to do patriotic things. It says how we can all work to make a better India. I am not interested in getting into the concept of jingoism. If one wants to be a jingoist, I don’t care. For me, my father going out to work every day to look after his children from Grant Road Station to Thane is patriotic.”
Freedom at Midnight is currently streaming on Sony Liv.
